Kids' Stuff: Max Mayer's "Adam"

It’s hard to imagine a receptive audience for Max Mayer’s Adam as anyone other than moony-eyed thirteen-year-old girls—not that Fox Searchlight would ever admit that this should be its target demographic. It’s an unimaginably precious retread of that most ubiquitous of rom-com plots, in which a troubled, misunderstood man comes out of his shell to earn the love of a beautiful, understanding young woman, but this one comes with an even more inflated sense of itself: this, after all, presumes to be an authentic look at the daily difficulties of functioning with Asperger’s Syndrome. And perhaps that’s where it started, in outline form, years ago. But in the transition to the screen, after going through industry cogs and gears, this Sundance-approved “charmer” has been squeezed out on the other side as something utterly prefab, a false facsimile of how people act in movie-land, a copy of a copy of human behavior. There isn’t a single shot or performance that feels honest, or that registers as anything other than passionless fodder for its players’ future highlight reels. (Is it just me, or is the “indie” branch of Fox singularly talented at searching out the least genuine, most contrived shitpiles in any given year? How do they do it?) Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Adam.